Electronic Arts are considering more support for Switch
During the latest investor call that Electronic Arts had, CEO Andrew Wilson answered a question about Nintendo Switch. Here is what his response was:
So we feel really good about it again, you know, we came out early and said we would be supporting the Nintendo Switch, with our biggest title in FIFA. We have a tremendous relationship with Nintendo and have done for many, many years and are excited by the fact that they have come out very strong and are bringing in a whole new player base into the ecosystem. Um, we continue to be bullish on it and are looking at other titles that we might bring to the Switch, um our console number that we quoted does not include the Switch at this point, so anything that Nintendo does is additive to that number. – Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts
While the comment on its own, are not proof of anything new, we still only have FIFA 18 coming to Switch, but the comments are better than what we heard after the Wii U’s release, with Need For Speed: Most Wanted U being the last game on a Nintendo home console. In fact they only released three games to Wii U owners in Australia, with a forth in North America, so the hope of seeing more content coming from the studio is only a good thing, but time will tell.
The final part was about numbers, EA expect home console numbers to increase from the current 79 million to 105 million over the next 12 months and that Switch is not being counted in that, at this time.
Cool story, EA. Wait til you see how people are enjoying it and then give a non-committal response about supporting it in the future.
You don’t get to just say you ‘came out early’ with support for Nintendo, when you also just admitted your forecast for stock movement doesn’t include Nintendo platforms. That’s not even mentioning your prior relationship with Nintendo in actuality. You poor representative, I wonder what the aftertaste of bullshit is like.
I’m a little cautious after their Wii U effort…sorry EA but 6 month old ports aren’t gonna cut it, if you’re fair dinkum about the switch then we need to see games come out at the same time as other platforms. At the very least I expect to see Madden and Need for Speed announced at E3, but surprise me EA!
It will be interesting to see what they do, if Switch starts performing like the Wii did, perhaps we will see original games to the platform, for now however I expect their support to come in the form of ports of their sports titles.
The biggest hurdle EA face with supporting Switch is their engine. Almost all of the games they have released this generation or plan to, run on Frostbite 3, including their sports titles and unless they can get it running without issue, it will halt all their work.